How Mac DeMarco Became the Lovable Laid-Back Prince of Indie Rock

LOS ANGELES — Before Mac DeMarco bought a lovely blue home with a pool on a quiet hill here in Silver Lake — the first real adult spoils of a surprising career built on seeming like an affable deadbeat — he gave out his exact address to fans, not exactly expecting them to show up in droves.

“Stop on by — I’ll make you a cup of coffee,” Mr. DeMarco, a mischievous singer and songwriter, said on a whim at the end of “My House by the Water,” an instrumental track from 2015. His place, a four-bedroom on the beach in Far Rockaway, Queens, was relatively secluded, directly across Jamaica Bay from Kennedy International Airport. But accessibility aside, people soon started showing up, and they didn’t really stop for the next six months.

“We had thousands of kids, all through the day, all hours,” Mr. DeMarco recalled recently as he chain-smoked Marlboro Reds in his new backyard, surrounded by overflowing ashtrays and discarded cans of beer and seltzer. “It was crazy. I really liked it.”

True to his word and reputation, he played amiable host to those making the Rockaway pilgrimage — his longtime girlfriend, Kiera McNally, “was a good sport for as long as she could be” — even as summer bloomed and space got tight. “Sometimes we’d have like 40 people sitting against the sea wall watching us rehearse,” Mr. DeMarco said, insisting that the impetuous stunt did not lead to any negative experiences and only brought him closer to his fan base.

That’s the kind of easygoing intimacy and relatability that has turned Mr. DeMarco, who is originally from Edmonton, Alberta, into what has become a rare breed: a breakout indie-rock idol whose consistent musical output — mostly mellow guitar pop in the mold of ’60s and ’70s songwriters like Harry Nilsson, Neil Young and John Lennon — is only bolstered by a fervent cult of personality.

As a kind of pied piper for the blog crowd, Mr. DeMarco, with his trademark gaptoothed smile and disarming baby blues, has tended to his flock not so much with the dubiously revealing gimmicks of social media, but on-the-ground, grass-roots outreach via nonstop touring and direct human connection.

His new album, “This Old Dog,” out Friday, May 5, is his third full-length LP and fifth release in five years on the independent Brooklyn label Captured Tracks, with each enjoying exponential growth. (“Salad Days,” his previous album, sold more than 100,000 copies in the United States.) But instead of blowing out his sound for bigger festival stages and more crossover opportunities, Mr. DeMarco has knowingly pulled back with a collection of his softest, most personal songs, recorded at home in Los Angeles, mostly on acoustic guitar.

“It’s funny, as things progress, I just want to keep making them smaller and smaller,” Mr. DeMarco said, his natural inclination toward a do-it-yourself punk ethos shining through. “I try to retain a certain amount of control. I’m not a freak, but I don’t want to do anything that I don’t want to do.”

He also seemed to recognize how crucial a sense of connectedness has been to his success. Approachable, genuine and undeniably charismatic, Mr. DeMarco, who turns 27 on Sunday, April 30, is a recognizable archetype to anyone familiar with small-time local music scenes — a trendsetting merrymaker likely to get drunk and pull down his pants onstage, but who also happens to be a devoted songwriter.

“I’m not the artiste — we’re just having a good time,” Mr. DeMarco said, recalling being drawn as a teenager to bands “that made me go, ‘Oh, I can do this, too!’” He added: “Kids tune in and they’re like, ‘Mac would drink a beer with me.’ And the answer is probably yes! These people are paying my mortgage, putting food on the table for me and my girlfriend. Thank you! And you like the music? That’s crazy.”

But as grateful as he is for the support, Mr. DeMarco was realistic and self-aware in acknowledging that his irreverent rock ’n’ roll prankster vibe and sense of humor — onstage, in legend and in countless playful YouTube videos — has spawned a following almost apart from his solid yet unassuming songs.

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CreditElizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times

“I’m like a meme,” he said. “My music is one thing, and then there’s also this weird personality that people attach to it.” That comes with expectations. “Nowadays, it’s like, ‘Put the cigarette between your teeth, man!’ But I did that already.”

Yet some bewilderment aside, Mr. DeMarco insisted that he harbors no existential anxiety about the jester role, mostly because it’s not a character. “I’ve always tried to keep public Mac and me Mac fairly in line with one another so it doesn’t become weird,” he said. It also provides a firewall for his art.

Mike Sniper, the founder of Captured Tracks, who signed Mr. DeMarco solely on the strength of songs uploaded to Bandcamp, marveled at the multiple facets of the singer’s career. “He’s given himself total privacy in his own music to make whatever he wants,” Mr. Sniper said. “Who else is afforded to be that serious as a musician and that goofy in person? I can’t think of anyone who can pull that off as well as he has.”

Mr. DeMarco toured and released music in Canadian obscurity, mostly under the name Makeout Videotape, for years before he signed to a label with any influence. When he did, releasing the more experimental, lo-fi “Rock and Roll Nightclub” in 2012 on Captured Tracks, the indie-rock stars were aligning.

The label, which had success with groups like Dum Dum Girls, Wild Nothing and Beach Fossils, had become “Pitchfork’s darling,” Mr. Sniper said of the gatekeeping music website, which was once a peerless tastemaker in that world and began championing Mr. DeMarco. “Whatever cultural cachet we had, he really took advantage of it and went nuts from there,” Mr. Sniper said.

Mr. DeMarco’s freewheeling, wide-scale debut also came on the heels of a more self-serious moment in the genre, which was dominated by headliners like Animal Collective, Arcade Fire and Dirty Projectors. “I played the internet game a lot in the first couple years,” Mr. DeMarco said. “A lot of videos, a lot of interviews, a lot of content.”

He added, “A lot of bands don’t give it up like I do, I guess.”

Even today, Mr. DeMarco’s every move is parsed online by obsessives. In addition to his rapper-esque 643,000 Instagram followers, the active r/macdemarco Reddit community includes speculation about not only his songwriting but also fluctuations in his weight (“Anybody else concerned with Mac’s recent decline in physical health?”), his finances and his relationship with Ms. McNally, who has become a co-star among the cast of characters in Mac World.

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Mr. DeMarco with his girlfriend, Kiera McNally.CreditElizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times

Another is Agnes, Mr. DeMarco’s mother, who has leaned into her niche celebrity status and now runs her son’s official, tongue-in-cheek fan club. “Right off the hop, these kids wanted to be my Facebook friend,” Ms. DeMarco said in an interview.

She described her son as a curious and enthusiastic child, who was “perhaps a bit of a rabble-rouser — very, very full of energy, much like he is now.” She added: “He draws people to him. Mac always traveled in a herd of kids, and even if they didn’t want to like him, they ended up liking him.”

Mr. DeMarco’s immediate loved ones have long featured in his music as well as his career, though he favors what he called “vague, pretty common themes and not very specific lyrics — little pop song nuggets.” But on “This Old Dog,” which Mr. DeMarco started at the Rockaway house and returned to after his move to California, he got more thematically pointed than ever, calling the songs “diary-entry style.”

The opening track, “My Old Man,” plainly addresses the father he grew up without and who struggled with addiction (“Uh-oh, looks like I’m seeing more of my old man in me”). The album was inspired in part by the two reconnecting under dire circumstances: a cancer diagnosis.

“I’d say see you later, if I thought I’d see you later and I’d tell you that I loved you if I did,” Mr. DeMarco sings in “Moonlight on the River.” The album ends on the line: “And even though you barely know each other, it still hurts watching him fade away.”

“It was my ‘See you later, partner,’” Mr. DeMarco said of the low-key LP, its sound stemming from the singer’s recent deep-dives into the careers of Paul Simon, James Taylor and Yellow Magic Orchestra. But in a twist, his father has since recovered to an extent, outlasting his diagnosis.

That this introspective moment coincides with Mr. DeMarco’s turning a corner into his late 20s and adjusting his lifestyle accordingly is probably not a coincidence. “I have retracted a little bit from just giving everything away,” he said of his public persona. But maturation is a funny thing for a singer whose generous high jinks are foundational to his popularity.

At his home in Los Angeles, those contradictions were on display as domesticity coexisted with the Neverland aspects of playing rock for a living. Guitars and gear were strewn in almost every room, and band mates had colonized the extra space, all while Ms. McNally baked sourdough bread and cinnamon buns, reminding Mr. DeMarco to take his fiber supplement. (He ate a spoonful of frosting instead.)

“I’ve lived in way too many crawlspace rooms,” Mr. DeMarco remarked, taking in his yard with astonishment and uttering a string of curse words for emphasis. “It’s such a fluke, so lucky and so amazing,” he said motioning over the pool, which at that point he had yet to swim in. “Look at this! See this! From playing guitar? It’s ridiculous.”